Yarr, eh? – Monday July 6th Roundup

Canada Day, and The Fourth of July. Being a half American half Canadian that makes this a pretty big weekend. Or it would if I was at all patriotic. Oh well. At least the rest of the company was out celebrating.

This week we have some unique jpeg optimization techniques, advanced segmentation in GA, designing to social systems, and The Pirate Party of Canada!

We start the roundup with BPWrap, a source of somewhat interesting internet marketing related jibbajabber. This (last) week they decided to do a piece on a couple of SEO mistakes that large companies make. What I find funny is that this is all they mention. These two are, in my experience, pretty common amidst large organizations, and even more common is actually link sales from fairly large sites that are sure of their page rank.

On a (always) more intellectual note we have the HuoMah, with Real time search engines; should SEOs care? The man with two first names himself comments on the fact that ‘real time” searrch engines arent so real time, that there are some major problems with the very notion of “real time search”, including performing a few searches through varoius “real time search engines” to watch results. The results were, as expected, somewhat poor. Go David, its nice to see other people taking reasoned looks at such hyped topics.

Technology

I love Smashing Magazine. Last week they posted some clever JPEG optimization techniques that blew me away. Even if you aren’t a designer or what have you this kind of stuff gives an interesting look into how optimization techniques work.

Finally, just to make you feel impotent here are May’s top ten online retailers by conversion rate. Again, this isnt that meaningful as metric as its sometimes made out to be (pretty sure Amazon.com outsells most of these people, despite a smaller conversion rate) but its neat to see, and to compare with your own site.

I hadn’t realized Postini was owned by Google, though in retrospect I guess that explains why we use it. Cnet takes a look at how Google sorts spam, and takes a look at Postini’s systems. As I mentioend we use Postini, and actually I’ve found its pretty darn impressive when it comes to blocking potentially spammy email.

And finally I may ahve a party that represents my view in Canadian politics: The Pirate Party is coming to Canada. With recent talk about the Canadian government mandating ISP’s to enforce Canadian content regulations on Canadian surfers, there hasn’t been a better time for a “free information” party.